The Great War
The Christmas Truce of 1914, World War I.
Winston Churchill, November 23, 1914
“What would happen, I wonder, if the armies suddenly and simultaneously went on strike and said some other method must be found of settling the dispute?”
TRUCE by Jim Murphy
To Germany, by Charles Hamilton Sorley
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each others dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm,
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.